Wired Style
A review of
<http://www.hotwired.com/hardwired/wiredstyle/>:
A companion website to Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age (HardWired, 1996)Daniel Kies
Department of English
College of DuPage
NOTE: As of February 2006, the
Wired Style web site appears to be
gone. Completely! Therefore, none
of the links to hotwired.com will
work. The magazine keeps archived
material online older than the
Wired Style site, so perhaps
this is a temporary problem the
magazine will correct shortly.When people familiar with writing and reading documents on the internet and world wide web think about usage issues in the digital age, the first thought that often comes to mind is the common practice of "netizens" to create neologisms, or disreguard konventional speling. others note the lack of capitalization after full stops, in proper nouns, or in acronyms like ibm. However interesting (or annoying) those traits of writing in electronic media may be, there is another set of usage problems that are not as obvious but (I would argue) even more serious.
Many of our colleagues in academe have long recognized the usage problems associated with HTML (hypertext markup language). HTML is the code that tells a web browser (like Mosaic, Netscape, or Internet Explorer) how to display the text on the screen. Quite simply, HTML has yet to evolve into anything like a full featured system for displaying text. For example, it is difficult to create a paragraph format with a hanging indent, a format so common to bibliographies and reference works alike1. Similarly, writers on the world wide web have no standardized way to present a citation to a web page that may be used as a source in another work. Also, different computer operating systems display the same HTML code differently on different machines. These are just a few of what I think of as the 'serious' usage issues that remain for the new media.
Thus, when the editors of Wired — that self-consciously hip magazine for the techno-elite — produced Wired Style, as both a book and a website, claiming to examine the "Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age," those of us who use the internet regularly for business and academic purposes treat this as welcomed news. Furthermore, considering that Wired Style comes to us from editors who know and understand the technology as well as anyone, we might expect Wired Style (and especially its website) to be the reference work that convincingly demonstrates the potential of the new media that the editors of the magazine so voraciously defend from, and promote to, the techno-peasants.
Following in the footsteps of earlier examples of "simultaneous" publication — such as City of Bits (MIT Press, 1995; http://mitpress.mit.edu:8000/City_of_Bits/index.html), perhaps the first book to be published simultaneously in print and electronic media — Constance Hale chose to publish Wired Style both in print and electronic formats. Unfortunately, unlike City of Bits — a fascinating exploration of electronic literacy by William J. Mitchell, Dean of the School of Architecture and Planning at MIT — Wired Style has a surprisingly poor presence on the web, a presence so informationally poor, in fact, that the website is not much more than a collection of short letters from Wired's editors making pronouncements on the usage of neologisms (Wired Style prefers email to Email, e-mail, or E-mail), supplemented by what amounts to a set of 'bookmarks' (hypertext links to other websites) that do offer more extensive usage advice. And that's too bad. The very people who advocate the significance of the new medium — hypertext — have not provided us with a site that demonstrates the potential of the medium.
Those of us familiar with the Help files of most Windows and Macintosh programs already realize the enormous potential of hypertext as a medium for handbooks and reference works. The Find function quickly lists for us all the materials in the text that match our query, and the hypertext links allow us to jump quickly from one place in the reference work to another or back again. The hypertext references will even track our search patterns, allowing us to see what we have been studying and compare it against what is still available in the reference work. The potential of hypertext has not been lost on technical writers. Maintenance manuals for complex mechanism such as aircraft, for example, have been published entirely in hypertext format. The technical writers realize that a paper version would be too cumbersome to use: if an emergency arises, one could more quickly access relevant information from a computer disk than from a 10,000+ page manual, and if maintenance crews find the manual difficult to use, then .... (See Joseph Devlin and Emily Berk, "Why Hypertext?" and H. Van Dyke Parunak, "Toward Industrial Strength Hypermedia," both in Emily Berk and Joseph Devlin, eds., Hypertext/Hypermedia Handbook. New York: McGraw Hill, 1991.) So the hypertext version of the manual allows a technician quick satisfaction to his/her query. Furthermore, hypertext reference works offer yet more advantages: not just static pictures, but also animated schematics, rotating 3D drawings, sound files, and full motion video to related information is but a click away (Robert E. Horn, Mapping Hypertext : The Analysis, Organization, And Display Of Knowledge For The Next Generation Of On-line Text And Graphics. Lexington, Mass. : Lexington Institute, 1989). All of those features supplement — but do not replace — the text. Those features are the elements that make text in the new media hypertext. By making the reference work both informationally richer and easier to use, hypertext is a suitable vehicle for manuals, handbooks, and reference works of all kinds. (To see an example of how hypertext can augment a reference work, see http://www.cod.edu/dept/it/newsclas/newsclas.htm — a tutorial in the use of News Readers, written by Cathy Rathke, a technical writer and the webmaster at College of DuPage.)
Indeed, I would suggest that the enormous processing power of the ordinary 486 computer has already made some great scholarship even greater. Having the OED on cd-rom, for instance, not only makes searching the dictionary faster and easier, but now we can also search in ways that would be nearly impossible in print. The computerized version of the dictionary allows us to search by reverse spelling or search by definition or citation only. We can search the entire work in seconds for every instance of the word we wish to study. The machine never grows tired; it never misses a single citation. (Please do not misunderstand. I do not wish to appear as if I am denigrating text as we know and love it now. In fact, I am among those who would argue that all text is hypertext — bibliographies and parenthetical citations are the 'hot links' to related sources, and [thinking here of my earliest experiences with literacy] traditional text is potentially multimedia, capable of conveying both the written word and the illuminating illustration.)
However, the Wired Style site offers us very little. The site is composed of a welcoming screen and an index page that present a bit of background information about the genesis of the Wired Style project. The site is then subdivided into six sections:
- Picking nits. A collection of the editors' pet peeves, such as the editors' dislike of user un-friendly.
- Picking brains. A collection of short pieces on usage by the "wordsmiths" (such as Tim Barkow, an editor at Wired, Douglas Coupland, author of Generation X, Shampoo Planet, and Life After God, and Mary Beth Protomastro, editor and publisher of Copy Editor newsletter).
- Ask E. Questions and answers with Constance Hale.
- Outtakes and updates. A database of new words and acronyms in the digital world. (This I think is the most interesting feature of the website.)
- Bibliofile. Largely a simple bibliography of reference works (e.g., The Chicago Manual of Style) and "grammar" handbooks (e.g., The Transitive Vampire by Karen Elizabeth Gordon). A second subsection consists of hypertext links to on-line reference works (e.g., the on-line version of Strunk's 1918 first edition of The Elements of Style [http://www.cc.columbia.edu/acis/bartleby/strunk/] — incorrectly identified on the Wired Style page as the Strunk and White edition— and Jesse Sheidlower's "Word of the Day" site at the Random House website [http://www.randomhouse.com/jesse/].)
- Talk back. A page on which we can read various 'threads' of on-going conversions about style and usage issues. The interactive nature of this page makes it very valuable.
Wired Style is not the only page on the world wide web that attempts to address usage issues in new media. There are several others already available. Many of them are more thorough and more informationally rich for writers who care about various usage issues. None of them are wide in scope however. For example, Andrew Harnack and Gene Kleppinger's site at Eastern Kentucky University (http://falcon.eku.edu/honors/beyond-mla/) and the IFLA's "Citation Guides for Electronic Documents" (http://www.nlc-bnc.ca/ifla/I/training/citation/citing.htm) offer much more discussion and usable information about usage issues related to the HTML problems surrounding citations. One could also look at "Grammar and Style Notes" by Jack Lynch at the University of Pennsylvania (http://www.english.upenn.edu/~jlynch/grammar.html) or "Links for Copy Editors" at the Copy Editor site (http://www.copyeditor.com/Links.html) for a wealth of on-line usage information and resources. In the table below, you can visit and evaluate those sites — and more — for yourself.
Links to Style Sheets
Links to Writer's Guides
and Usage Handbooks
Mail questions or comments to Daniel Kies
Department of English
College of DuPageIn sum, Wired Style lives up to its name only in part. It certainly is a handsome site, easy to navigate, and visually appealing. The website does have style in that sense. Unfortunately, however, writers in these new media most need to cope with the 'wired' part; in that, Wired Style, the website, does not help us learn how to get the most from the potential in hypertext. Writers still lack consistent, systematic ways of handling fundamental usage issues in the digital age.
Note
1The problem of hanging indents persists even in this age of "web sites built to W3C standards" by employing the power of CSSs to control text layout. Using CSS, one can emulate a hanging indent on a paragraph through a style rule such as:
blockquote p.hangingindent {text-indent: -2em;}.
The basic idea is to create a negative indent, or hanging indent, for the first line of the <p class="hangingindent"> element. This is the technique I am using in this note itself to create the hanging indent that I hope you see.
However, the technique has its problems. The degree of the hanging indent is inconsistent, depending on the font. Furthermore, while this technique works in many browsers, some browsers can not render such a style rule properly: "While this technique is NN4 friendly, it falls apart in Opera. Instead of properly outdenting the first line, Opera applies the negative indent as if it were a positive indent, thus creating an even worse problem than if it had ignored the text-indent all together." (Newhouse, "Hanging Punctuation," http://www.realworldstyle.com/hang_punct.html, 2002.)